I Want It Now! The Fierce Urgency of Videogaming’s Future

 GameLife | Wired.com

LAS VEGAS — Videogame execs say impatient gamers increasingly act like Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory — they want their games now, Daddy, and if you don’t give them what they want, they’ll find somebody who will.

“People have no patience,” said Steve Perlman, CEO of OnLive, a company that is currently beta-testing a service that streams high-def games directly into homes without the need for consoles. “What they want is all media, and they want it instantly delivered.”

OnLive isn’t the only one trumpeting gamers’ need for speed at the DICE Summit here this week.

“We lose players on the loading bar,” said Brian Reynolds, chief game designer at Zynga, maker of the hit Facebook game FarmVille. Virtual vegetable farmers are so anxious to get playing that if the game takes too long to get going, they’ll close the browser window, he said.

The 20th-century notion of waiting around to watch shows when they air on television, or saving up to buy CDs, is quickly becoming antiquated as technology makes it easy to consume movies, TV and music on demand. As game development and distribution methods evolve, the same trends are changing the way the videogame industry works.


Gamers can expect to play rapidly updated games on a growing array of devices, from iPhones and Android mobiles to Apple’s upcoming iPad. Everyone’s already expecting the death of the disc, but if on-demand gaming takes off, it could kill traditional digital delivery, too: Who’s got time to download a whole game?
In his DICE keynote address Wednesday to kick off the annual confab of game industry executives, Steve Wadsworth, president of Disney’s interactive division (pictured top), said his company’s massively multiplayer online kiddie worlds like Club Penguin are “the digital equivalent of Walt’s theme parks.” But while “kids are happy to come to (Disneyland) and spend hours in line for Space Mountain, they’ve got a very short threshold when it comes to interactive media,” he said. “They want what they want, when they want it.”

Disney's online world Club Penguin makes a habit of rapidly responding to gamers' requests.

Today’s teens can barely wrap their heads around the old distribution model: Close to half of children’s television viewing is either time-shifted or done on a mobile device, Wadsworth said. They expect that everything is always available.

Min Kim, vice president of Nexon America, maker of the popular free-to-play MMORPG MapleStory, has noticed the same thing. “(My friend) was trying to explain the Munchkins from Wizard of Oz to his kids, and the kids are just saying, ‘Let’s look it up on YouTube.’ They want everything, like, right now,” he said.

The Race for Pink Puffles

That presumption of on-demand fulfillment means game developers need to become more responsive to consumers’ requests. When Disney acquired Club Penguin for an unheard-of $700 million in 2007, it was surprised to find that customer service representatives made up a majority of the workforce at the company. “They’d spend 20 to 30 minutes on the phone with the kids who play the game, listening to their ideas for making it better,” Wadsworth said. The designers could then take the kids’ ideas and act on them, changing the game instantly to make it the experience that the customers asked for.

“If enough Club Penguin players sent e-mails saying they wanted pink Puffles, then the Club Penguin team added pink Puffles. Fast,” he said.

This ran counter to Disney’s philosophy, which was to avoid taking unsolicited ideas, according to Wadsworth. It wasn’t engaging its other MMO audiences in the same way. “It didn’t matter how many Toontown players were telling us if they wanted a new blue Doodle, we never knew about it,” he said. “We changed our entire approach to customer support and service.”

Nexon America’s Kim says his company closely monitors its customer base and structures MapleStory and other games around what fans are doing and what they want. “I don’t think a lot of players know how much influence they have,” he said. When Nexon noticed some players abandoning MapleStory after playing for just a few hours, it relaxed the game’s difficulty curve to make the title stickier.

With titles like Sweet @$! Poker, Richard Garriott hopes to bring sophisticated graphics to Facebook games.
Image courtesy Portalarium

Not every social game designer believes in ceding such development control to players.

“I don’t agree with the statement of, ‘If the users demand a big sword, you’ve got to go make a big sword,’” said game designer Richard Garriott. “You have to listen to your constituents … but they are not game designers.”

As the creator of the role-playing series Ultima, Garriott was one of the first big-name game creators. His later efforts, the MMOs Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa, weren’t as successful. Now he’s launching a social games company called Portalarium, which will bring higher-powered games to platforms like Facebook.

“A lot of the traditional developers here are ignoring the (social gaming) space because they think it’s beneath them,” he said. They’re missing the forest for the trees: Even casual gamers playing simple games on MySpace would like to have smoother graphics, better user interfaces, Garriott said. For example, a Portalarium game called Sweet @$! Poker is built not with Flash but with the Crytek engine, he said.

The OnLive welcome screen offers on-demand options for videogamers.

Meanwhile, OnLive’s Perlman is betting that the instant-gratification mechanism of Facebook games will work for existing big-budget, hard-core games.

The OnLive microconsole and controller might free gamers from bulky consoles.
Images courtesy OnLive

OnLive will let gamers use a small module about the size of a deck of playing cards to play games like Mirror’s Edge and Prince of Persia. Controller inputs are sent over a broadband connection to a dedicated server farm, which sends the video to any screen in the house — your TV, your PC, even your iPad. All without needing to buy additional hardware or download software.

“Are we going to introduce an $800 or $1,000 console and expect people to flock to this thing?” said Perlman. “We need to find a way to eliminate pricey hardware. We need to focus consumers on the game, not the … Xbox.”

Perlman has a dog in the fight, but in his DICE presentation Thursday, he backed up his big statements with hard data. About a quarter of all downloaded media was consumed in real-time, streaming formats in 2009, he said, more than double 2008’s figure.


If games are moving the same direction, then the future of game consoles could very well be no console at all — just a universe of streaming games, all available at the instant whims, and tweaked to the latest desires of an increasingly capricious public.